Another George Manning-Sanders novel surfaces

I suspect I may be the only one keeping track of such things, but another novel by George Manning-Sanders (1880 or 1881 to 1953, when he died at age 72) for which there's no online record has popped up. (I had both his birth year and death wrong in previous Papergreat posts, by the way.)

I discovered Little Comfort via a listing on eBay. According to the photos and item description, it was published in 1932 by Grayson & Grayson of London. It must be exceedingly rare.

It joins 1930's The Third Day (also published as The Burnt Man) and 1929's Drum and Monkey as confirmed novels by George Manning-Sanders. These may very well be his only three published books, as he was more known as an artist.

The gorgeous dust jacket illustration of Little Comfort seems to promise a tale of life in a rural English town, but who knows? It's a little hard to tell given the level of resolution, but there is what appear to be the initials GM toward the lower right of the cover illustration. So perhaps it's by George himself?

Here's an excerpt from my copy of Drum and Monkey that I randomly turned to:

"Bickford Honey, aged seventeen years, the product of care and the source of contention, strolled in the evening of a summer day toward the home of Mr. Mason. In his trousers pocket there were a few pence, his hat set jauntily on the back of his head, he felt that life was good."

Related posts

• The jaw-dropping dust jackets of George Manning-Sanders' novels
• Jaw-dropping dust jackets of George Manning-Sanders' novels, Part 2
• George Manning-Sanders' short obituary from 1953
• Happy 130th birthday, Ruth Manning-Sanders

Saturday's hand-painted postcard

This colorful handmade postcard arrived this week from Benilde, a Postcrossing member in Spain who is a cook. She also enjoys stamp collecting, architecture, jazz and the restoration of antique furniture, all of which sound like wonderful hobbies that don't require staring at a handheld screen all day. We should all send more postcards, but especially handpainted ones like this. I need to up my art game! 

From 1976: computers & kindness

Browsing through this 1976 edition of Grolier's The New Book of Knowledge Annual, which I really do have to prune, along with a few other similar hefty-size tomes, I came across a few things worth sharing.

First up is an article about KIND, aka the Kindness Club. The Kindness Club, a humane organization, was founded in New Brunswick, Canada, in 1959. The Human Society of the United States took responsibility for the U.S. youth clubs and branded them KIND — Kindness In Nature's Defense.

"To carry out the club's program, members are encouraged to help fight against the abuse of animals. And members do more than speak out when they see evidence of cruelty to animals; they follow their words with actions," the Grolier's article states.

For an update, Wikipedia adds: "In 2009, the Kindness Club's 50th anniversary year, most of its members were in Canada. Continuing to base itself on [Albert] Schweitzer's reverence for life philosophy, the club promotes humane education for children and contributes to local initiatives including subsidized spay/neuter programs and donations of pet food to food banks."

Given that I took a break while putting this post together to take a bowl of food to a skunk on the back patio, I think I might qualify to be in the Kindness Club. 

Meanwhile, another page in this book from a half-century ago touts the emergence of a computer's "artistic skills." 

"This portrait is 'painted' by a computer," the caption states. "It is made up of about 200 separate squares, each in one of 16 shades of gray. The portrait is part of an experiment being carried out by Bell Laboratories 'to learn the least amount of visual information a picture may contain and still be recognizable.' Have someone hold the page about 15 feet (5 meters) away from you, and squint your eyes. Hint: the subject of the portrait was president of the United States during its most critical period."

Indeed, if you hold the computer portrait further away, you can imagine an extremely low-res Abraham Lincoln. 

While the short caption doesn't mention it, the computer programmer for this Lincoln 'portrait' was Leon Harmon. And the image inspired Salvador Dalí to create a famous lithograph (though that's not quite the right description) that has been much-counterfeited. 

I couldn't help but think of how all of this relates to one of the most contentious ideas of our modern moment: generative AI taking the work of human writers and artists and creating "new" content that is just a facsimile of human originality. AI slop barreling toward model collapse.

I saw Backrooms with Ashar a couple days ago, and afterward I struck by this insight about the horror movie from writer Bianca Michelle Parker on Bluesky: "Saw Backrooms. Pretty hard not to read it as an allegory for AI. The Backrooms seem massive and fascinating at a cursory glance, but ultimately just regurgitate stuff at random. They have no meaning, insight or significance and are only of continued interest to those who have no capacity for growth."

I think that's just one of many interesting angles to touch upon regarding Kane Parsons' well-done film about eerie liminal spaces. I'm fascinated and invigorated by how millennials view and try to recreate the 1980s and 1990s. Why they are nostalgic for an era they didn't live through. What they view from those decades as the beginnings of what's gone sideways in the 21st century. And it goes hand in hand with the love some millennials have for "old" physical media, from the world before the internet and smartphones. There's a lot more I hope to dig into.

To end on a completely different note, here's a cool photograph of Bobby Clarke of the 1975 Stanley Cup champion Philadelphia Flyers from the Grolier's book.

From the readers: Montoursville, Skyrim, Africa and much more

I have some catching up to do, because it's the first "From the readers" of 2026 and the first once since early November. Thank you, as always, for your comments and insights! 

Montoursville 2018: My schools (Part 3): Anonymous writes: "Hello Chris. Mr. Derr also showed me (us?) 'Chariots of the Gods' on reel to reel. lol. Hence starting my lifelong interest in UFO topic."

Thanks for commenting! That's pretty hilarious, the idea of a science teacher showing a film about Erich von Däniken's dubious theories regarding ancient astronauts — pseudoscientific theories that weren't even originally his! 

This also reminds me that I was a student at C.E. McCall Middle School in early 1982 when everyone was buzzing in the hallways about The Jupiter Effect — the idea that we were going to suffer great cataclysms on Earth when all of the planets "aligned" on March 10, 1982. As it turned out, we survived. But, hey, those two guys sold a lot of books about it.

Related posts:

• 1967 advertisement for a flying saucer lamp in Saucer News (which contains links to all of the other UFO posts)
• Sunday evening ramblings
• Vintage, foreboding religious tract: The Mark of the Beast

Friday nostalgia: Who remembers 1970s flip-it cartoon books? RickA writes: "Thank you for this post. The memory of this was vague. I couldn't recall what the main book was like — but I distinctly remember the 'flip-book' portion of these. You (and Google AI) helped answer that question and also helped me recall the fun I had with these. I know we had two of them. Now to search for more with your blog helping me start my journey."

You're welcome! I like to think of Papergreat the start of many internet journeys! 

Ringing in the holly-jolly month with a vintage Christmas postcard: Tom from Garage Sale Finds writes: "I have a few Christmas postcards postmarked late on Christmas Eve and I always think of that postman working late on Christmas Eve, stamping postcards (not sure if there was machine for that by then) and thinking how he'd like to wrap things up and get home."

Old postcard featuring Markleton Sanatorium in Somerset County, Pa.: Anonymous writes: "I live on the property where the building was and I know there isn't anything there."

Reader submission: Amazing collection of vintage Cheerful Cards: Anonymous writes: "I remember selling these fondly. I had a suitcase full and sold individual cards as well as boxes. Walked or rode my bike around the neighborhood. Actually sold Cheerful and one other now national company. I still have my business cards from the early to mid 60’s. I am now 71 years old."

Thank you for sharing those memories! 

Holiday hanky from Peoples Laundry & Dry Cleaning: Anonymous writes: "My Father, John Paleczny, started Handy Hanky Inc. in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. He expanded to the U.S with a shop in Niagara Falls, N.Y. He passed away in January 1962 and the family sold the business to Mr. Harry Hosey of Old Hickory, Tenn."

Thank you for sharing this information! I hope it helps anyone else who might be doing internet journeys into this topic.

Lost Corners: The Skyrim dog tale: Anonymous writes: "Thank you for this. I read the original a long time ago, and wanted to revisit it. Googling 'twitter skyrim adopt a dog' brought me right here."

You're welcome. And I'm glad for any opportunity to repost this image I made of Coby inside a video game.

Victorian trade card for Partridge & Richardson's Bee Hive: EC writes: "Thank you so much for this informative post! I was trying to learn about another trade card from this business; I thought the business itself was Bee Hive, lol!"

Intellivision's "Night Stalker," my first survival horror video game: Anonymous writes: "I can still hear the heartbeat ... playing under all the action and other sounds. Very thematic! So good after all these years ... they did a lot with so very little."

My grandmother's 1982 trip to Africa: Ray from the Along the Ray blog writes: "Talk about.a small world — back in the early 90s I typesetted Holbrook Travel's newsletters that were mailed to their customers. They are still around and rocking it. Thanks for sharing, I enjoy your posts and get them via your RSS feed in my RSS reader."

Oh wow! A small world indeed. This was certainly not a post I expected to connect with someone. Thank you for reading Papergreat! (Also, you and I are in the dwindling group of folks who know what typesetting is.)

Book cover: Ida Chittum's "Tales of Terror" (1975): Anonymous writes: "A fascinating and colorful look at the books, life and mind of an authentic writer and storyteller from a wild and lost world. Full of beauty and mystery."

Who wants to join me in buying a crumbling, haunted British estate? Henry Thompson asks: "Does anyone know who now owns Downe Court Manor? I lived there in the 1960s. The ghost photo through the trees was taken by my father. If you do know who owns the place these days? I have some 18th and 19th century documents relating to the house and the Selby-Smyth family, and these may be of interest to the owner. email: hodt11@gmail.com"

Old photo postcard of Brackenhurst Hall in Southwell: And here's another query: "My grandfather worked there as butler for Lord and Lady Hickling. My mother was born in one of estate cottages in 1920 and her two sisters several years later. I lived at No. 1 Home Farm and spent my childhood there.

My father was the head herdsman following WWII —1973. Or thereabouts. There were quite a few families living in the farm houses. The Millards, Paul Millard whom I played with in school holidays, the Thicketts, their daughter had polio and her father was a lecturer, Mr. & Mrs. Lythe, Farm Principle, Mr. & Mrs. Mee next door to Number 1 our house. Contact me at (apaws4chat@gmail.com) if you would like to chat more about Brackenhurst."

The (new) oddest stuff I've found tucked inside a book: Commenting on this 2012 post, Anonymous writes: "Thank you for your research. I found several skeins of embroidery floss at a thrift store from Cynthia Mills. I am so happy to know more about the Mill"

Luckyday buttons — the talk of the town: Anonymous writes: "I have 2 cards, both with the 6 buttons, strawberry blonde hair, red hat with white flower. Also have a Lady Washington Pearls, 6 blue men's shirt buttons. The man on this card has a white shirt, red tie, and is holding a golf club."

RIP Art Bell, of the Kingdom of Nye: This feels like a good one to bookend with the first comment in this roundup. Commenting on this 2018 post, Anonymous writes: "Listened to him as a kid laying down in the back seat of our car as my family drove home late night. Today I’m 65 years old and I listen to his podcasts nearly every light. Can’t get enough. Love ya Art!"

Gimbels & Gumball

As I continue unhoarding/resimplifying, here's my grandmother's card for Gimbels, a chain of department stores that closed for good in 1987. Her last name is misspelled on the card, which is fairly par for the course with that name.

As I wrote in a 2013 post, "Gimbels was around from 1887 to 1987 before being liquidated. It was headquartered in New York City and once had the biggest chain of department stores in the United States. But perhaps its greatest legacy came in Philadelphia. ... It was in the City of Brotherly Love that Gimbels launched the first department-store parade. The first Gimbels Thanksgiving Day Parade was held in Philadelphia in 1920."

In addition to the 2013 post, here are some other posts that have mentioned Gimbels over the years:

• Brighten your summer with vacation specials from Lit Brothers
• Neat stuff from an 1880 volume of Edgar Allan Poe's works
• Moon landing clippings, Part 5

Beembom never threw away an old ID, credit card, driver's license or business card, so I've been pruning them slowly since we cleaned out the house on Oak Crest Lane. This Gimbels one is kind of neat, which is no reason to keep it. But it might fetch a few bucks. It looks like they can sell for about $10 apiece on eBay, so maybe there's a collector/nostalgist out there who wants it and I get enough to buy a few cans of cat food.

Speaking of cats, we have managed to add another one to the household. Outdoor community cat Gumball, who I mentioned in early March, seemed to be sick and struggling, so on April 29 I trapped him (which itself was a minor miracle, because I'd been trying for months to TNR him) and took him to a veterinarian. Turns out he had multiple broken teeth, bad tartar buildup and a gum infection. We got him all fixed up with surgery (including neutering) and now he's staying in our guest bedroom. And here's the amazing part: It turns out he absolutely loves people. He is the sweetest boy. He loves pets and scritches on every part of his body, including his belly. He loves to cuddle. And he hasn't displayed a single antagonistic trait toward people. This strongly reinforces my belief that he wasn't born feral. He must gotten lost from his human family or, more likely, abandoned by human dillweeds. We have several cases like that, sadly, probably including Yinzer and Marmalade, who I also mentioned in March.

Given his love for people, Gumball can't (and won't) just be tossed back outside. So we'll find ways to start integrating him into the household with other cats ... or perhaps there's another human who can offer him a forever home. Either way, he's safe now and he'll get his daily pets and scritches. And, yes, his Temptation treats. And look at those blue eyes! 

Some Postcrossing arrivals

I've had some time to get back into Postcrossing a little bit, and I've received some nice cards and messages in the mail the past few days. 

The "A Call for Peace" postcard is a Karen Kerney design that's available from the Syracuse Cultural Workers website. Sender Misty, who lives in Georgia with her family, eight cats, dog and a tortoise, hopes for a better world for all.

The card featuring the "Outlaw Guns" and "No Nukes" buttons is from the collection of the Busy Beaver Button Museum and was mailed to me by a "friendly ghost" in Maine. "Friendly ghost" writes: "I hope the future is governed by science, peace, and collaboration."

And on the vintage card showing the southern tip of Manhattan, sender Amy writes: "This card came from my dad's apt. when I cleaned it out. Seeing the Twin Towers brings back memories of that sad day. I wish religion and politics would bring the world together — instead of tearing us apart. Pray for peace."

It's the 50th anniversary of the opening of Brigantine Castle

Brigantine Castle, the haunted attraction on the pier in Brigantine, New Jersey, opened 50 years ago, on Memorial Day weekend in 1976. It was in operation for less than a decade and burned down before it could be demolished, but it lives on in the memories of many who went to the Jersey shore's beaches in the late 1970s and early 1980s. 

In fact, it's in so many memories that it spurred more than 600 comments on a Vintage Philadelphia post on Facebook that went up just this morning. Just a few of those comments:

• "I remember going as a kid. I thought it was a real castle. What a great time to be alive."
• "Scary tv commercials wedged in between the terrifying 'Creature Double Feature' on channel 48"
• "Its TV commercials were the first time I ever heard J.S. Bach's iconic Toccata and Fugue."
• "I went through it as a kid. Remember the fake rats going across my feet!"
• "Best Job I ever had!!"
• "We went the year it opened & didn't get past the first floor, that witch did us in. Granted we were 5, 10, 11 & 13."
• "The vampire that jumped out of the portrait scared the crap out of me!"

I wrote a fair bit about Brigantine Castle in this 2016 post, which you can check out, so for this anniversary I wanted to share some images from a hard-to-find brochure that I managed to track down a few years ago.

Related posts

• Brochure for the Boris Karloff Wax Museum in Niagara Falls 
• 1977 children's book about actual (maybe) haunted house
• Dilapidated structures of Southern Jersey

T.E. Dikty, regarding science and science fiction 70 years ago

One of the reasons I've held onto The Best Science-Fiction Stories and Novels: 1956, which I purchased from Jim Lewin at the York Emporium, for so long is because it features an excellent and compelling introductory essay by T.E. Dikty, whose lived from 1920 to 1991 and whose full name was Thaddeus Maxim Eugene "Ted" Dikty.

It seems to me that in this time of treacherous antiscience, rejection of historical truths and a warming world ever-teetering on the brink of greater violence, some of these passages by Dikty are worth amplifying:

• "This was the year when the United States announced it would shortly launch an Earth satellite, when hundreds of lives were saved by the polio vaccine, and when a general announced that hundreds of millions — friend and foe —  would be lost in the event of another war because of radioactive fallout."
• "In Germany, a major science-fiction crisis impended when the government was about to ban Utopia and Utopia Grossband on the grounds they contained 'atomic war' stories. Due in large part to a plea by well-known American science-fiction fan and agent Forrest J Ackerman, the German censor board reversed its stand and allowed the magazines to continue."
• "Parents throughout the nation would have no difficulty at all in pointing out the most signficant science development during the year. That was the vaccination — after some delays — of children and expectant mothers with the Salk polio vaccine. Although not 100% effective, there was no doubt that the vaccine substantially reduced the number of cases."
• "Atomic power for peaceful uses was being investigated more eagerly each year, with the realization that by the year 2000 the world will be using eight times as much energy as it does now and fossil fuels will be incapable of supplying this demand." 
• "Electronic brains were in the news again. This time they were going to replace the weatherman in forecasting the weather."  
• "A guided missile was developed which is guided to its target by the heat given off by said target (and in what science-fiction story did we first read about this?)."
• "With every passing day Tomorrow was a little closer, and science-fiction writers had to be spry and inventive to stay ahead of onrushing technology. The world of the future was no longer just around the corner —  it was racing pell mell up the block."